NEW RESOURCES

A project on Reddit is trying to put together a database of every bar/restaurant/food-and-tv in the world where you can watch hockey. “The Great Hockey Bar Database project is a massive undertaking – a singular attempt to collect every bar, every pub, every restaurant, every beach cabana and any other spot on the earth that shows hockey — all in one place. When the time comes when you ask yourself ‘Where can I watch the game in this town?’, the Great Hockey Bar Database will provide you with every single answer possible. From this moment on, there is no more saying that you don’t know where to catch the game. The Great Hockey Bar Database (or, the “GHBD” for short) provides you with everything you need to make an informed decision on where to watch the game.”

The state of Texas has launched its new eminent domain database. “This publicly available tool will show which governmental and non-governmental entities have reported to the Comptroller their authority to exercise eminent domain…. The database contains 5,042 entities, including cities, counties, school districts, special purpose districts, pipeline and energy companies, water supply corporations, telecommunications companies and other public and private entities.”

New-to-Me: My friend Esther S. sent me a note about VacantNewYork.com weeks ago, but I’m still catching up. It’s a map of vacant storefronts in New York City. From the “How It’s Made” page: “The project began with a mix of frustration and curiosity. Almost every single store, venue, grungy dive bar, and cheap restaurant I visited as a starry-eyed punk rock teenager and questing twentysomething was gone. Some were replaced with chain retail and luxury brands (and banks, so many banks) but an increasing number were sitting empty. My neighborhood began to look decrepit. As much as I bemoan national chains and the homogenization of the city, you can argue to me that the nationals are beneficial: they can weather economic downturns, they create jobs, they provide cheap goods and services to people who can’t afford much. I’ll probably still think you’re wrong, but I’ll listen to the arguments. Vacant storefronts provide value to nobody.”

Wow, this is a new one on me. A retired music teacher has created a video archive of musical numbers from high school plays. “Now former Bristol students can relive their high school memories thanks to Ken Ferris, retired music teacher. Ferris has compiled an online video archive of songs from BEHS musicals from 1992 to 2002.” Obviously I don’t think you all went to Bristol, but I’m including it here because it’s so unusual. This would be a wonderful project for high school students taking classes on video production – archiving is important!

Emory University’s student newspaper, The Emory Wheel, is being digitized. “The Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library announced Aug. 22 that it will digitize all archived copies of The Emory Wheel dating back to 1919, according to a tweet sent by University Archivist John Bence. All issues of the Wheel will be scanned and made available for the public through the Rose Library’s online database, Bence said.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Still use Google Patents? It has added several new countries. “When we started Google Patents almost 10 years ago, our mission was to make patents more easily accessible. Today, we’re announcing the addition of 11 more countries to Google Patents with over 41 million new patent publications, bringing the total to over 87 million publications from 17 patent offices around the world.”

The Library of Congress “Today in History” site has gotten some updates. “In August, Today in History received its first major redesign in nearly a dozen years, and the redesigned collection can now be accessed from the Library’s home page. In addition to a streamlined look that allows easier navigation among Today in History’s 542 essays, the collection also offers an email alert service where you can subscribe and receive daily notices about the day’s featured items.”

The ALA has put its latest Webinar “Finding the Public Domain” online. “Melissa Levine, Lead Copyright Officer and PI, University of Michigan Library and Kristina Eden, Copyright Review Project Manager, HathiTrust, describe the Copyright Review Management System (CRMS). The CRMS was this year’s awardee of the L. Ray Patterson copyright award.” The Webinar is free and just under 55 minutes.

Chrome will start marking http connections as unsecure. “To help users browse the web safely, Chrome indicates connection security with an icon in the address bar. Historically, Chrome has not explicitly labelled HTTP connections as non-secure. Beginning in January 2017 (Chrome 56), we’ll mark HTTP sites that transmit passwords or credit cards as non-secure, as part of a long-term plan to mark all HTTP sites as non-secure.”

USEFUL STUFF

The arguments continue: When’s the best time to share on Facebook? “…many of the strategies used by publishers for optimizing engagement and boosting referral traffic from social are flawed. Using data from leading publishers, we will dispel the myths and demonstrate that there are no universal “best times” to share content on Facebook. We analyzed the median traffic that articles received from Facebook three hours after they were shared. Using the median for all stories and a year’s worth of data helped ensure the analysis wasn’t skewed by outliers. Our analysis garnered some fascinating discoveries..

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

PC World: Data hoarders are shining a spotlight on past breaches. “Vigilante.pw is among numerous data breach monitoring sites started by anonymous internet users that routinely post details on newly uncovered stolen data. They’re a big part of the reason why, week after week, the full scale of past hacks is gradually beginning to surface. Recent news on a 2012 Dropbox breach, for example, was initially sourced from a separate service known as Leakbase.”

RESEARCH AND OPINION

Harvard Business Review: What 100,000 Tweets About the Volkswagen Scandal Tell Us About Angry Customers. “We examined more than 100,000 tweets to analyze how the public sentiment changed over time after the breakout of the scandal. Our approach to capturing themes in the evolving scandal involved sampling a few date windows; therefore, we did not examine data for every single day. The following periods were selected: September 29, 2015–October 7, 2015; October 18, 2015–October 27, 2015; January 1, 2016–January 7, 2016; and January 17, 2016–January 25, 2016. These periods align with some of the events relating to the scandal, and also represent periods during and following the scandal. We explored the daily tweets from these periods by considering all possible events that might have affected the public sentiment over Volkswagen. Entire sets of tweets including the word “Volkswagen” were in our initial data set. We made several observations about how the scandal unfolded in the public conversation…” Good morning, Internet…

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